We need more large screen e-readers

Over the course of the past four years the e-reader industry has taught us that large screen e-readers are in demand. The Onyx Boox Note, Remarkable, Sony Digital Paper and Boyue Mimas have been selling like crazy and there is a huge demand for these products. The upcoming Wiskey EE Write Pad has received a ton of attention for a first time product and I believe this will be the e-reader to beart in 2019. I think it is time that Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Kobo release their own large screen device.

The only truly large screen e-reader that Amazon ever released was the Kindle DX and it was ahead of its time. It did not have a touchscreen, instead it featured a keyboard with a D-Pad. This 9.7 inch device came out in 2009 and one year later they released the international edition and the graphite. The Graphite was continiously sold for the next five or six years. Amazon never sold a large screen e-reader again, but did buck the six inch trend with the Oasis.

Barnes and Noble has only ever released six inch e-readers, but the company has admitted they are no longer a tech company and has outsourced all of their products to third parties. The Nook mentality is offering products that are really cheap and try to sell them to customers in their stores or online as impulse buys, I don’t believe there will ever be a large screen Nook e-reader.

Kobo has been willing to experiment with screen sizes for the past nine years. The company released a five inch Mini and went all the way up to a 7.8 inch screen with the Aura One and Forma. There has been a ton of demand for the more expensive Kobo e-readers for a couple of reasons. They have Overdrive integration and Kobo sells digital manga, which are perfect on these types of screens. The average Kobo customer is over 40, and at this age people tend to start needing glasses or need larger fonts to read properly, and the Forma/Aura One met these needs. Kobo is in a prime position to release a 10.1 or 13.3 inch screen device.

People tend to buy 10.1 or 13.3 inch e-readers because they want a large screen device that can take notes, make highlights and annotations with a stylus. Onyx and Boyue release great hardware, but they are hardly a household name in North America and Western Europe, which has prevented them from reaching critical mass. Remarkable was a tremendous success story, their first product sold over 25,000 preorders and have almost surpassed 100,000 units in their first two years of doing business. The Sony Digital Paper has had four different generations of products over the years and represent the largest company operating in the large screen space.

Would Amazon or Kobo ever release a large screen dedicated e-reader for their customers? The Oasis 2 and Forma have taught us that people are quite willing to spend over $300 for a large screen product and if they released something with a 10 or 13 inch screen and charged $200 more, I bet they would sell like hotcakes. The only question would be, is if they would incorporate a stylus and a WACOM screen to take digital notes, or if they would just be happy with a dedicated ebook reader. Developing a Linux based note taking app from scratch and using a WACOM layer would be troublesome, since neither of these two companies have any experience in this field.

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.

Very happy with my Kobo Forma. 6 inch is too small, 7 still feels not enough, but 7.8 or 8″ is just perfect. If it’s just for reading, I think 8 is the happy medium. The Forma is pretty spendy too but I feel it was worth it.

Sportbike Mike

Since Kobo, B&N, and Amazon are primarily book sellers as opposed to device sellers, they really have no good reason to move into that market. It would be like Uber’s financing arm expanding into trucks. It wouldn’t help them in their core business, and as stated in the article, their products would probably be inferior to what is already available.

“The Oasis 2 and Forma have taught us that people are quite willing to spend over $300 for a large screen product”

So much confirmation bias there. I got the Oasis 2 for my wife and just loved it, as did I, just for the design and great screen. After a while we realised it’s got a bigger screen than my Voyage, but we don’t care the slightest. So I bet there are others that bought it not for its screen size (or not mainly).

As for demand elasticity – $300 is at the high end of the market and you think that an additional 70% would result in a product selling like hot cakes?

After all, assuming the technology exists at a decent price point, why do you assume companies haven’t done any research to judge demand? I’m pretty sure that if their research showed there’s a mass appeal there’d be a couple of mainstream models by now.

This. Since I don’t have any major issues with my eyesight I prefer my books small and easy to handle. Yes, there have been times where I wanted to read a PDF and then a bigger screen would be a plus, but really, how many people do that compared to ‘regular’ ebooks?

I mean, there are technical and/or color PDFs I want to read, but for color I go to my 10″ tablet. So even a bigger Kindle wouldn’t solve my problem. Technical (drawings, images etc) files are a sore on e-readers, BUT the biggest problem isn’t the screen size but the atrocious reflow and rendering of the PDFs. So again the bigger screen size would just be a very expensive way to solve a software problem.

b. free

i am still having difficulty saying exactly what i like… i have all the screen sizes… and so far I would say I prefer the 13.3 for reading the newspaper (press reader) and pdfs. And I like my 6″ for light reading of books. I am not using my DX hardly at all. Ideally, I’d like to be able to “stretch” the device to fit how I feel at the time and based on the material… but that may be quite a ways in the future for that.

Heidi Steindel

There is no good or bad when it comes to screen size for we all have different tastes. I feel 7″ is the perfect size for reading. I like the oasis screen but I wish it was more rectangular than box shape that way it will mimic a paperback better.

I feel that a larger format is quite good for my reading purposes and I use the Kobo Aura One at home. When ever I leave the house, I pack along a Kobo Aura, as a large ereader is inconvenient for me to carry in a pocket.

Paul Berger

I have tons of research papers to dig in and I would love to read them on their original A4 format. For this I’m currently using an Ipad Pro with inverse video but I’m willing to switch to an eInk based 13”3 eReader, provided it has decent search and indexing capabilities.

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kfg

The Paperwhite/Voyage has a screen ratio of 1.29. The Oasis 2, 1.33. A paperback book of conventional dimensions I just grabbed off the shelf (How To Solve It; G. Polya), 1.45.

As for the casing format, form follows function. Printed books have the dimensions they do because of physical limits of the materials and the ergonomics they impose. Applying those to a tablet reading device does not necessarily make sense. The Oasis is designed for one handed reading in a way that a paperback cannot be.

Of course it is (subjective), but it proved oh so easily that your own assumption of objectivity is, as a matter of fact, false.

And I don’t get how a matter of preference can be ‘false’ as you claim – you might want to check your logic on this ?

Harry Zee

This brings me back to “beating a dead horse” regarding e-reader screen size. I have used over time a Kindle DXG and two variants on the 7.8 inch screen size. I abandoned the DXG since I preferred using a touchscreen format and the first 7.8 inch I used was an in house OS which eliminated d/l and installing any Android software (my favorite being ereader prestigio). The second 7.8 inch was Android compatible but the company went belly up last year and never returned my unit that I had sent to Holland for repair. What I have used for some time now off and on with these and now as my primary is my trusty old Nook HD+ with it near “Goldilocks” screen size of 8.9 inches. This page size nearly replicates the size of a trade/over sized paperback and for me has always been the best compromise. I long ago converted this to full Android operation and it has served me well ever since and continues to soldier on. Its one real drawback is battery life when reading numerous hours per day. Would give anything within reason to see an eink or pearl screen in this size at a lighter weight and slimmer format along with long battery life and at least a 300+ resolution.

Oz

If you’re in Europe and found article looking for an a4 e-reader, I really recommend the tolino epos.
It’s not A4 size, being I think 7.8 inch, but its high resolution, so you can easily read books that were originally a4 size without any squashing or stretching.
I use it for scans of old text-heavy magazines from the 80s, mostly. It doesn’t handle newer graphic-intensive magazines very well at all, but for technical docs, journals and textbooks, it’s really good.